Prison Break: "The Mother Lode"Review

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Word to Scofield's Mother.

By Ahsan Haque

After an extended hiatus, Prison Break is back, and the action picks up from where we had left off before, with the somewhat startling revelation that Scofield's mother is alive and well and is working on getting a hold of Scylla for herself. Lincoln ends up meeting his mother who he thought was dead for so many years, Scofield and Sara continue their escape, and the General is rattled after a murder attempt.

"Awkward" would probably be the best way to describe this episode in a single word. Everything about the episode felt a little off. Maybe it's all the time the show's been off the air that makes the believability pill harder to swallow in this case, but much of the plot seemed overly convoluted and a lot of what happened simply didn't make much sense. As is usually the case with Prison Break, if you're willing to let your suspension-of-disbelief guard down (way down), then there's definitely some entertainment to be had here. At least you know this is all leading to something bigger down the short road ahead, since there are only a few episodes left in the series.

The writers did a fairly decent job in setting up motivations for some of the secondary characters, but at this point their inclusion feels pretty redundant. There's no real reason to continue to have Don Self and T-Bag in the picture. T-Bag as a "good guy" never worked, and watching him care about his "mama" in a state home feels completely out of place. T-Bag shouldn't care about anybody but himself, and it kind of feels like the character's been wrecked with this sudden change of heart. Don Self's card has been played a while back with that perfectly executed betrayal several episodes ago - there's nothing that can top that at this point, and the character should have been killed off a while ago, unless of course the writers have something up their sleeves. Pushing Sucre out of the picture (at least temporarily) was a great move, and maybe the same should have been done for T-Bag or Self. William Fichtner, on the other hand, shines as Mahone, and it seems pretty useful to have him stick around and have Lincoln's back.

Pitting the brothers against each other seems pretty out of place too. Their conversation didn't really make much sense, but perhaps it might have been staged, like so many other cryptic plans we've seen in the past (perhaps they knew that Linc's phone might be tapped or something).

The assassination attempt on the General didn't make much sense. If Scofield's mother wanted him dead, wouldn't it have been easier just to shoot him instead of driving away and giving him enough time to undo his seatbelt?

The scene with Lincoln and his mother didn't feel quite right either. Why didn't she actually try to convince her son about what she was really trying to do other than tell him to stay away for a couple of days? Did she really think that was going to work?

It seemed like this episode, and subsequently the series, wasn't going anywhere until the very last scene where Lincoln returned to the location where he met his mother and she seemingly orders one of her men to shoot her son. It makes you wonder what's really going on here, and was a very good set up for the next episode.

It might have stumbled out of the gates, but Prison Break is back, and while much of the episode felt like things were going in circles, the last scene had just the right amount of build-up to make you want to come back next week. With only a few episodes left in the series, let's hope the race to the finish line is more exciting than this.